Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), title page and table of contents

To those mentors and friends,

professors in the University of Virginia

and giants in the earth,

James Southall Wilson,

Armistead Churchill Gordon, Jr.,

John Cook Wyllie, and

Frances Lewis Berkeley, Jr.

ALMANZOR. Stand off; I have not leisure yet to die.

Dryden, The Conquest of Granada

[front flap:]

Edgar Poe's life continues to fascinate, its events beclouded by myth and fantasy. Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the gifted and charming poet of Providence, Rhode Island, was engaged to Poe in 1848 and was among those who knew him best. This volume offers the largely unknown and unpublished correspondence between Mrs. Whitman and John Henry Ingram, Poe's English admirer, that is the basis for Poe biography.

The book makes fascinating reading. It offers information about Poe which has not been fully taken advantage of by Poe's biographers, including Ingram, and it provides the most complete contemporary portrait of Poe available. The account is also special in its sensitive and incisive discussion of Poe from a woman's perspective. The volume reveals much about Helen Whitman, herself a critic and poet of considerable stature, and it chronicles the peculiar relationship of Mrs. Whitman to Ingram.

The first biography of Poe by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, published in 1850, was a vicious and slanderous account that has become the source for many Poe myths. Ingram came to Poe's defense and published his vindicatory biography in 1880. The letters begin in 1873 with Ingram's impassioned appeal to Mrs. Whitman for assistance and end in 1878 shortly before her death. They deal with almost every question that has ever arisen about Poe as a writer and person. Supplementing the letters are rare contemporary articles, letters to newspapers, and important book reviews that hitherto have been virtually inaccessible.

The correspondence between Ingram and Mrs. Whitman is itself dramatic, from his wooing her for help to his deliberate [back flap:] destruction of her belief that she was Poe's only love after the death of his wife. The drama concludes with her wry and witty attack on Ingram only fifty-four days before her death.